And September 7th was the day the Serbian government approved the decision to require teaching both evolution and creationism in school. I'm sure that was completely random, but it is kind of interesting (and not to start a flame war) since Spore is built on both the principles of evolution and creationism, though admittedly, less creationism and more intelligent design.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but Intelligent Design IS Creationism, just renamed to fool people on purpose. I'm sorry you fell for the Dicovery Institute's trick.
Read about the Wedge Strategy [wikipedia.org] and the accidentally leaked Wedge Document [antievolution.org].

Sorry, but I do not adhere to that notion. I believe in Creation but do not believe in Intelligent Design. I am able to see connections between macro-evolution and my theistic evolution beliefs and thus the theories Intelligent Design provides are not necessary to "fill in the gaps", so to say.

You say I fell for Discovery Institute's trick, but it seems you are under the impression that anyone who believes that God is the Creator must also believe that He scattered dinosaurs fossils around and that the Earth is 6,000 years old.

Intelligent Design is Creationism, but not all Creationism is Intelligent Design. As you pointed out, there is a very strong place for religion and God's work within evolution, seeing as evolution explains the how not why; SimHacker's logic was simply flawed.

I don't think that it's the job of science to explain why, just how. Why is for philosophers. Also, if it was God or any super natural being that created everything, I don't really care about the why, but I definitely what to know how.

My logic isn't flawed, I'm simply reporting the flawed logic and lies that the Discovery Institute themselves perpetuate, but don't tell the general public. They were very upset that the Wedge Document leaked, but it tells it like it really is. The Discovery Institute says one thing in private to their superstitious religious whack-job supporters who believe in the fairy tale of Creationism, and they say something totally different in public. That IS their Wedge Strategy. That's just what the Wedge Documen

Now don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of religion. I think it doesn't belong but it certainly can be made to fit. The "Why" in these questions refers to the fact evolution has no purpose, it has no ultimate goal. It is a methodical process that happens. If you ask "Why humans have two arms" the answer is really the answer to "How did humans get two arms" - they way you're asking it, it's the same question. If religion can say to what purpose something was created, and evolution says why, then it works out

I think you're mixing yourself up. Yes, scientists do intelligent design all the time, but Intelligent Design, with all caps, is a specific train of thought. It doesn't apply to anything humans do, it applies to some other-worldy being/thing cultivating life as we know it.In this "God-less ID" theory of yours, what is the "other thing" that is creating life akin to the way scientists do? It wasn't evolution, according to that theory, and it wasn't man, so it must've been something else, some other design

The only difference, I guess, is that you could theoretically apply ID to alien's creating humans from test-tubes in a lab, instead of God. But, for 95% of people who believe in Intelligent Design, with maybe the exception of Tom Cruise, the "intelligence" refered to is God/Yahweh/Allah/Jahova/Brama/etc.

So while ID COULD, theoretically be different from creationism, in practice, it's simply a way of making creationism seem, somehow, accademic.

The God-less ID theory is that the life on this planet originated in a similar way.

And how, precisely, did the smart (and missing) aliens with the great biotech come about? They must have been created too, ID "theory" clearly says so. So either they owe their existence to God, or you have infinite regress. (Or, if you ask me, God is nothing more than an excuse to dodge infinite regress arguments...)

Choice quote : ""the illusion of design in the living world is explained with far greater economy... by Darwinian natural selection""the universe would appear the same to us whether it was designed by God or not"

You say I fell for Discovery Institute's trick, but it seems you are under the impression that anyone who believes that God is the Creator must also believe that He scattered dinosaurs fossils around and that the Earth is 6,000 years old.

No one gives a shit what you believe about God and creation. That's totally beside the point. All we care about is whether you want to pass it off as science and have it taught in schools as science. If you're not into that, no one cares whether you've managed to suppre

Good point. Intelligent design is really an assertion that the Universe is too complex to attempt to understand so we should all give up trying to understand any of it. It's all too hard, the God ate my homework. People forget that a lot of this stuff orginally coming from cults is about political control and really has nothing to do with either religeon or science.

Darwin is really not the personification of the enemy for these people - it is Mendel. An educated member of the clergy (blasphemy for some

Evolution does not require a director... If you think it does, then you have profoundly misunderstood what the process of evolution is all about.He or she could have just disagreed, not misunderstood. I think you'll find that most biologists or medical doctors who are religious believe something like directed evolution, and it's probably safe to say they understand the fundamentals of evolution.

Evolution is a complete theory without any sort of director, but if you believe in a higher power of any sort, it

This is the prototype for the soul of The Sims, which Will Wright wrote on January 23, 1997.

I had just started working at the Maxis Core Technology Group on "Project X" aka "Dollhouse", and Will Wright brought this code in one morning, to demonstrate his design for the motives, feedback loop and failure conditions of the simulated people. While going through old papers, I ran across this print-out that I had saved, so I scanned it and cleaned the images up, and got permission from Will to publish it.

This code is a interesting example of game design, programming and prototyping techniques. The Sims code has certainly changed a lot since Will wrote this original prototype code. For example, there is no longer any "stress" motive. And the game doesn't store motives in global variables, of course.

My hope is that this code will give you a glimpse of how Will Wright designs games, and what was going on in his head at the time!

"Dollhouse" was a working title for The Sims, so that's what he's talking about. Thing is, I've never been all that impressed with the Sims autonomous behavior. Maybe I didn't train mine properly or something, but they can't even make it the bathroom in time without me reminding them. So it's hard for me to take all these "insights" seriously.

The idea for that game sounds interesting and slightly disturbing from a philosophical point of view. (At least my philosophical point of view) If you have a simulated person with a simulated soul, feeling simulated feelings, living the simulated life that you give them, then you are simulated god. That sounds great until you stop to consider if you then have moral obligations to your sims. That might sound ridiculous until you think about all the people in this world who ask questions like, "If there is a

You have just perfectly summarized the point of Stanislaw Lem's [www.lem.pl] short story, "The Seventh Sally [blogspot.com]" in his excellent book "The Cyberiad [wikipedia.org]" (also reprinted in DugHof's "The Mind's I"), which inspired SimCity [wikipedia.org].

In addition, Wright also was inspired by reading , a short story by Stanislaw Lem, in which an engineer encounters a deposed tyrant, and creates a miniature city with artificial citizens for the tyrant to oppress. [1]

So I was discussing this news with a couple of my friends as we'd all been interested in the game. Sadly, I will be in the middle of studying for PhD qualifiers instead of being able to play. This brought up joking of just getting a real job instead so I could actually play. The conversation might go something like this:

"So Dr Adviser, I was thinking about taking quals. But Spore's coming out on September 7th so I'm going to get a job instead. kthnxbye."

So I was discussing this news with a couple of my friends as we'd all been interested in the game. Sadly, I will be in the middle of studying for PhD qualifiers instead of being able to play.

What?...Ohhh. I see. You actually think this means it is really going to come out on September 7th. How quaint.

You need to understand how to calculate actual release dates from announced release dates. What you do is take the delta between the last release date they announced and the current release date, divide by the

Anyone else think its kind of strange that they're announcing the release date 7 months out? I seriously doubt the game is done with all the testing and balancing that needs to be done with it. It's almost like they're trying to slap a ship date on it regardless of whether it will actually be ready by then. Let's hope it's complete enough when it actually does ship. I'm not holding my breath, though.

It's not that strange, if you define "strange" as meaning something similar to "unusual". It is a bit of a worry though -- my general impression of Spore has been of a "it's done when it's done" type of project, and aiming for an arbitrary release date seems contrary to that.

Still, I have hope. Even all those years ago when it was first demonstrated it appeared pretty gamey, even if the different phases weren't linked. And I've been seeing various hands-on previews that say the game is virtually complete.

From the amount of times that Will Wright has demoed large portions of this game at various game conferences and other gatherings (just search for "spore" on Google Video, or check out the links on the Spore wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]), I don't see how this can qualify as vaporware. DNF has only one (likely pre-rendered) trailer to show for all that development time, Spore has hours of demo videos.

From all the videos I've seen, it seems like the bulk of the game is finished, and the only tasks that remain are gam

The only confirmed platforms so far are Windows PCs, Macintoshes, the Nintendo DS and various mobile phones. Wright wants the Wii, 360, and PS3 to have the game, but they're not firm 'yes'es yet.

The article:

A Wii version has already been announced. What can you say about what that's going to play like in terms of structure, control, etc.?

I can't say much about it except the fact that the overriding kind of factor in my mind and Lucy [Bradshaw]'s, in terms of looking at what direction that team goes with it, has been to make really good use of the controller. What interests me about the Wii is that in some sense you have a much higher bandwith controller than you have with any other console or even a PC. How do we abstract the maximum Because one of the biggest advantages we have is our procedural animation system, which means that we can have an infinite of variety of animations that we can make the creature do because it's done procedurally. So that's a natural kind of strength of having a higher bandwith input device--it should really feel like I'm puppeteering this creature very directly, as opposed to I'm just indirectly controlling with a few buttons here and there. The rest of the design is totally going to evolve around that.

These are contradictory. I think I'll go with the story itself.

Also, something out on a cellphone before major consoles? That seems odd -- is it a first?

* The so called "Underwater stage"? Supposedly this was cut in lieu of your creature moving from cell to the beach...* Flying critters, or otherwise critters with wings?* The length of each stage? In the latest interview he talks about difficulty levels and how that will affect it, so... How long will it take each stage on the average difficulty?

So we've got those who complain about companies releasing a product before it's ready, and then we've got those who complain that a product is taking too long to come out. I'd like to think that Spore is one of those games that's going to have playability over a large range of ages - you're not going to outgrow it. Sure, we're not getting any younger, but you gotta admit you still wanna have a crack at it, and you still will when it's finally released.

Has it taken a long time from concept to completion? Yeah, that's a pitfall they've encountered. Maybe their timing is good, though - the MMO world has calmed down a bit, the Wii isn't as brand-spanking-new, people have done Bioshock... now there's something new to anticipate and it's not competing against the "biggies" we've had lately. Granted, in the months to come we may find that new hardware and games are going to challenge it. But think of it this way - it's certainly piqued your interest, right? Controversy means people will take a look at it, just to find out what the fuss is about.

If the game is good enough, it doesn't matter when it's released - it's not going to miss the boat because it's not trying to ride a fad. In the meantime, we can still play the games we've been playing. No need to hop from one game to the next constantly, just sit back and enjoy what you're playing... when Spore comes out, you'll be ready for it, and maybe you can take the time to play it out and appreciate what it is, rather than whipping through and waiting for the next late-release game.

I don't mind waiting for Spore; to be honest, we should be forced to wait more for games, or really any product. As far as I see it, every day we wait, the game becomes slightly better. Yeah, they could probably rush it out by May or June but who cares? It'd be a much sleeker, smoother product by September. I'm more than willing to sit back and wait for something awesome if it's actually going to be awesome. Rushing never helped anything.

This game has been marketed to death as some Will Wright masterpiece. What exactly has Will Wright done other than an early 80's game about building a city, and a game who's main purpose is to wash dishes and trap people in a pool?

I'm not saying Spore will be good or bad, but I'm not buying a game who's sole reason for hype is a guy who's managed to make two franchises and milk them to death in a way that makes Nintendo jealous.

Perhaps I can restate the gp's gripe in a more constructive and clear manner:"I didn't enjoy Will Wright's previous game series, and I found the number of expansion packs for each series to be repetitive and/or redundant. I'm sick of hearing about Spore, people have been hyping it more than the second coming of Jesus Christ(Christians) and/or The Purple Lizard God (Mormons)."To be honest, I tend to agree, this game has been talked about to death; it looks mildly interesting to me, but not that great as a g

What exactly has Will Wright done other than an early 80's game about building a city, and a game who's main purpose is to wash dishes and trap people in a pool?

I think the point is that Will Wright created the definitive game about building a city, and the definitive game about people washing dishes. There are other city building games, and other games where you push around people and see what they do, but none are as good as the simple and elegant creations that Will Wright has come up with. Following t

Did you ever play SimEarth, SimLife, or SimZoo? They really sucked. This is his fourth try at the same basic idea, and it's hard to believe this one will be any better, much less take it for granted it will be some kind of classic. This is a game developer who's made a couple classics, but the large majority of his releases are either instantly forgettable, or add-on packs. All the hype over a collection of mini-games seems out of place.

I liked SimEarth. and SimLife was interesting. They were both games that suffered from, IMO, insufficiently advanced standard PC's; SimEarth would be pretty cool on a modern system with modern graphics, and SimLife... well, it wouldn't have become spore, but I could see it becoming a pretty cool game.SimAnt was just too confusing, but I could see it being a decent RTS.

It's amazing how many things that have been considered vaporware for so many years are coming it this year. Obviously most have still not sent he light of day but we are starting to get release dates. I always thought Spore would come out in the next 12 months but a few old friends like Duke Nuke Em Forever will have a bitter sweet edge to it. There needs to be a little mourning for some of the more long lived bits of vaporware. I just hope they both live up to expectation so it can be a positive thing them

What I fear is that spore will end up like black and white, which is to say they will try to turn it into a game.Most simulation games are fun because they basically let you play god. The world is your sandbox and you can do pretty much anything you want.

Black and white had this, and had a pretty cool sandbox, with people you could pickup and throw around, and a semi intelligent animal you could train to do tricks. Then they added the "game" elements.

PC == the incorrect but general term applied to a Windows computer, as opposed to a Mac. "iTunes. Available for Mac or PC," for example.
I see that spore IS coming out for Mac, but smeh... its still sunny outside in September.

Probably, though I've never understood that convention. Given that PC stands for personal computer, and Macs are personal computers, would that not imply that both the Mac and PC guys are PC guys? (Well, unless that conspiracy theory about macs being group computers is right...dun dun dun!)

It seems like the project took an average amount of time, and they just turned on the hype engine way too soon.

Game makers should learn that the longer the period of hype, the higher the expectations. Let's hope, for the developer's sake, that this game is really extraordinary, because after all the hype, "good", or even "great" won't be good enough.

Other than so-called Madden Gamers and Halo-fiends, nearly every gamer is looking forward to this. How do I know this?

Because unlike some other developers, when Will Wright says he is implementing some crazy idea into a game, he actually implements it and implements it well. Not to suck the man's pecker, but the possibilities of a game like Spore are quite beyond anything previuosly conceived in the interactive entertainment world. Just read through interviews with him about it, or better yet just read through the Wikipedia article about it. I don't mean skim over it, I mean sit down and truly read it and absorb everything that this game is aspiring to do (and, based on what Will Wright is saying, is doing successfully.)

When you look at what he is hoping to accomplish in this game, and what he is saying is already there and in somewhat playable form... itwould have been impossible even just a decade ago. His early description of it by calling it "Sim Everything" seems like it will be an accurate label.

Lastly, keep in mind that the ONLY thing that we have any sort of details about are when you are still in the cell-sized areas of the game. If they are putting this much detail into what is happening when you are the size of an amoeba, imagine what the rest of it could possbily be like...

I know I sound like some sniviling Will Wright fanboy who wants anything the man releases, but again...go and really read about what this game is trying to accomplish. It's mind boggling.

I'd rather just wait and see what the game is like before judging it based on what he is saying. Sure, some people are more credible than others, and I have no doubt I will buy the game...but getting all ramped up over hype is a guaranteed way to get disappointed even if the game is great.

The 2D roll would be amazing... if it didn't need cleaning every 2 or 3 days to track properly. I do a lot of big zoom stuff and it's nice to pan around with. I'll admit to being a heavy user though, so ymmv.

As for the grandparent's point about chorded clicks... please Apple, I'm willing to put up with a thin 'crack' between the left and right buttons. Perhaps this'll stop the damn thing reading right clicks as left as well. It looks lovely, but my Microsoft Bluetooth gear is far more practical.

Also, if you have the capability to track who is using a pirated copy, you have the capability to ban them from your systems, right? If it's a more decentralized model, and you can't stop them, then you don't really have the capability to track them. QED.

Why was Zutroi marked troll? He got a good point (except that it is not confirmed for the PS3). The PSP is a more powerful system, so it seems like it would be a better choice to handle a game of this scope. However, I think the popularity of the DS and the additional control options of the DS are what won out in the end. Besides, the DS might not be as powerful as the PSP, but it's still a very capable system.

Two reasons I can think of. If the game interface works better with some kind of pointing device, a DS port would be easier - you'd just have to strip out visual effects until it ran, rather than completely redesign the UI. The other reason is market share. The DS is outselling the PSP somewhere between 5:1 and 10:1, depending on whom you ask. Since mobile gaming is typically regarded as a niche, the PSP would be a niche within a niche.

I'd love to see a Star Wars MMOG where you could slip in and out of perspectives (with some load time of course). Imagine flying as an individual tie fighter, X-Wing, gunner on a battle ship, etc. (with other players or AI). Meanwhile, other players could be controlling the sides of the battle from a Homeworld-type perspective. Above them could be other players who are controlling things at a higher "Master of Orion"-perspective. This way, communication could be facilitated between players on the same team throughout these different perspectives.

So, basically, you want a MMOG that plays like Battlestations: Midway - except maybe with one more layer of abstraction.

I assume the controls would present *some* challenge. A controller pad has a more limited controls than a PC; not to say it can't do it, just that it requires more than just a quick function mapping. A large portion of Spore is supposed to be about sharing just about everything, and I'm sure Live presents some challenges and requires a lot of interaction with Microsoft, atleast that's what other developers have said. Furthermore, DS and cellphone versions were said to be limited to a or a few certain "level

I'm not a main PC gamer personally, but to go with what you said, I feel Steam saved PC gaming for me. PCs were better at it in theory, but in practice, consoles had better games (in general, with notable exceptions, like many Blizzard games), just because of the marketshare and marketing... But with Steam comes a new factor: Impulse buy. I can go from wanting a game, to getting it, before I have time to doubt myself:)

Not sure if thats actually good or bad, but my childish self likes it.

Having just rebuilt my PC this summer, for the recent Orange Box (which I hear had its problems on 360 and should not be talked about on the PS3), Crysis (PC only), as well as improving my development environment with a quad core, modern ram, and various other leaps, I can certainly say I feel I get a superior experience on my PC. I suppose genres that translate better on the PC (RTS, FPS, MMO) are shrinking a bit (as your FPS example may well illustrate,) but I would argue that a PC can offer advantages. A

Spore started as an experiment by Will Wright that later got folded back into the company. I'm sure they're all really leery of it still and don't want to invest in making this game for every processor known to man with some kind of proof that it'll actually sell. The Internet Hype Machine (tm) has managed to convince them it'll sell well enough to put it on a few of them, but it'll have to actually sell before they'll feel comfortable with more. Wright isn't God at the company, merely a very, very stron